Category: Software

It seems that The Verge Forums became a platform for techblog readers, that can think and have something more to say, that just troll the comment section. A recent post by modilwar is a good example of that. In a nutshell, modilwar speculates about how Apple can increase the size of the iPhone’s display, while getting the maximum effect from it (i.e. increasing the display resolution) and avoiding the issues with fragmentation and existing applications. His solution? Change the aspect ratio, so that the display becomes more vertically elongated.

Modilwar also proposes two solutions to fight fragmentation issues, which would arise from moving to a different resolution: applications that use standard iOS user interface elements can just scale up to use addition screen real estate to display more content, while applications with custom a UI (e.g. games) can run at their native resolution of 960 x 640 pixels with black bars occupying the unused space.Read More »

Former Apple TV UI designer and “Professional Hobbyist, AppleTV” Michael Margolis went vocal on Twitter about the new Apple TV redesign last night. He says that Steve Jobs himself tossed out the new designs 5 years ago. He adds, “Now there is nobody to say ‘no’ to bad design.”

I call bullshit on his comment. As most of us know, such product development choices are rarely made at the last minute – people work on them for years before the final product is released. This means that most of the “recent” design decisions at Apple, with high probability, still went thru Steve. Steve’s absence from Apple will only influence Apple’s design maybe in something like 2 to 4 years.Read More »

While The Daily first reported about Microsoft planing to release its Office suite for the iPad back in November 2011, its recent story clearly says that the app will soon be submitted to the App Store for approval. And while Microsoft denied this claim, telling The New York Times that the story “is based on inaccurate rumors and speculation”, it should be obvious that it is not a question of “if”, but “when” Microsoft will release Office for the iPad. Not only is the iPad already just too huge to ignore, but its continued rapid growth clearly threatens at least some of segments of the computer market, that are currently occupied by Windows PCs.Read More »

Another great post by Christoffer Du Rietz touches the topic of a so-called skeumorphism trend in Apple’s UI. While the majority of tech blogosphere simply bashes skeumorphism, Christoffer Du Rietz tries to look at the reasons that made Apple utilize it.

Apple has built it’s iOS devices to be the perfect app consoles. Apple has created this perfect blank app canvas so the apps themselves can stand out and make impact. The clean hardware design creates extra leg-room for creative expressive design, not the other way around. And Apple is using that extra leg-room to its full extent. I see this as a perfectly coherent strategy.

If you’ll read reviews of the the recent HP/Palm smartphones, RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook or the HP TouchPad, it’s very likely that you will find praise for their “card-based” user interfaces, as one of the best features of those products. The card-based UI has been widely referred as one of the most convenient ways to use a touch-screen device and the best way to switch between multiple applications running on the device. With all of this I still think that a card-based UI has serious problems, that are rarely covered, if covered at all.Read More »